Objective
Identifying social innovations and successfully scaling them across Europe will be necessary to meet Europe’s challenges. While the number of social innovations has grown, and the ecosystem of actors to support them has developed, there remain numerous missed opportunities for scaling efficiently and effectively. The social innovation sector differs significantly from the commercial sector in its participant’s general willingness to share successes and models. However, the service model for delivering the professional support needed to scale innovations has not yet developed to take this into account. Other factors that exist as barriers to effective and efficient scaling include the lack of visibility of small / local innovations, and lack of mechanisms to connect different sectors together to collaborate and coordinate action. Resources that are available are often being developing with particular stakeholder groups, for example the public sector, foundations and non-profits, and the social economy. Those looking to get involved or increase their efforts find the emerging landscape complex, potentially slowing down entry.
The proposed project aims to overcome these barriers, specifically by:
• Establishing coordinating mechanisms and procedures between existing incubation and support networks, increasing the collaboration and coordinated action between sectors and across geographies
• Creating a flexible coalition of other actors to interact with the core network (Social Innovation Ambassadors Network), to support and spot new opportunities to develop support programs
• Testing new and existing approaches to social innovation incubation by systematically tracking the identification of social innovations and ensuring and tracking the provision of support to allow them to reach scale.
With this project we target at least 300 social innovations to be proactively identified and supported in their tracking the delivery of support needed to execute the scale-up.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP7-CDRP-2013-INCUBATORS
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
CSA-CA - Coordination (or networking) actionsCoordinator
1000 Bruxelles / Brussel
Belgium